So They Went

Uh... fiction

7

Straight north of Iowa City as the crow flies a hundred fifty miles or so the world gets hilly.

That’s where she is from, Angie says.

“There's deer all the time and It's too hilly to farm. There’ve always been hillbillies up there living on what they could get off the land,” she says.

“There’s people I grew up with who never had a job. They'd fix your car for you or roof your house, but they weren’t roofers or mechanics.”

“It’s Driftless.” she says in a voice that sounds like she’s trying to sell my dad a car.

I raise my eyebrows and shake my head a little so she knows I don't know what that means.

“It just means it's all hills and creeks.”

Do you run when you’re mad? Do you stay put and fight? What fucking difference could it possibly make. There isn’t even a fight to be had. Without the controlled territory on the other side of the river it’s everyone versus everyone until the bars open.

There was no gas. So there were no cars, no generators, no power tools. When it started to happen we were all pretty sure it was over, but it wasn’t.

Going someplace where they were living wild had this mystical appeal to a city kid like me. I recalled the back to the land schemes the old hippies talked about.

Angie said she knew people who did it before everything went bad, and their lives couldn't have changed much.

“If you have a garden up in a creek canyon and you know how to hunt a little and fish a little, pick mushrooms and ramps and sunchokes, good dogs, maybe a horse or a couple horses… Those people might never have had to change anything. No one went out there…

“We could just go there. Take the money and just go. Start up up there.

“I used to just walk all day sometimes and never see anyone.

“There’s wild strawberries. Have you ever had a wild strawberry, Old Man?”

“I haven’t had a piece of fruit in twenty years.” It might’ve been 30.

I thought a minute. She sat on the bed smiling like crazy, like maybe I never have seen her do.

“We had those raspberries last summer.”

She nodded. She never stopped smiling.

“Let's think on it a day or two.” I could see it a little bit.

I think I loved her more, just then. She looked like she might stay up all night like a kid at Christmas, bright eyed, overcome with the spirit of receiving.

Angie went to sleep after we did it and I stayed up. I felt like that teenager running down the alley behind my parent’s house. The future was wide open. I had no idea what would happen and I was just going for it.

Angie would have to carry two rifles. I put a little latrine shovel on my backpack and quietly tucked boxes of rounds and pairs of pants into the shape at the bottom of the frame pack I had stashed under my bullet press.

I started to take the money out of the ceiling. It was a disappointing volume of twenty dollar bills and an only slightly less disappointing volume of hundreds.

She rolled in the bed like she might wake up and I stopped for a minute kneeling at the side of a pile of rubber banded handfuls of twenties and hundreds the size of myself.

There was no way we could take it with us. It felt dangerous to be around.

I opened the door to the wood stove, picked up as much as I could lift between my two hands and pressed it through the door into what was a big ember and a small flame from a couple pieces of split pine inside the stove.

It darkened in there for a second, then roared to life. The unlit ends and whole rubber banded bills flapped like flags in the wind when the flames came up. And the flame took them all while I watched, somewhat relieved to be done with it. Disappointed not to be able to spend it on something nice. I couldn’t imagine what. The steel on the roof was more than thirty years old.

When the fire died down a little, almost right away, I worried the stove would go out and threw in another stick of split wood and sat and watched it take. I lifted one end with a poker to get some air under it, leaning it on the ember that was in there before the money.

I closed the stove door. The pile of money was still as big as me. Angie was still asleep.

I grabbed another press of bills between my hands and threw it in.

This time while it burned, I put an old plastic bag full of black powder in a purple Crown Royal bag in on top of my pairs of pants in the frame pack, lifted my rifles and my dad’s shot gun out of the racks on the far wall and put them next to the money and my pack on the floor between the stove and the bed where Angie slept.

There was a feeling rising up in me. It felt amazing to burn the money.

I looked around and wondered if she’d feel obliged to take her tea, or lengths of cloth.

We could talk about it in the morning.

Eventually the shelter was too warm and the pile of money was no longer as big as me.

I put twenty thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills in the side pocket of the frame pack and an uncounted big grip of twenties I left on the floor. There was kind of a bad burning smell. I put in a second stick of split wood once the rest of the money was burned, and crawled into bed.

Neither of us recalled how long it had been we were living like this- closed in and armed. And there wasn't anything left for me to gather here. So once she’d packed her things, the next night, we walked out, roughly north through the dry weeds where the corn and bean fields used to be. It was clear and barely cold enough to wear our jackets once we got going.

Angie stayed close enough to me so she could quietly tell me about what it was like there.

“There's places where water just shoots out of the side of the hill, clean enough to drink, or it used to be before Viet Nam. Soldiers brought back some bug from the jungle that got in all the water. It’s no worse than dirty tap beer lines. There’re caves and sometimes places where there’s a hole in the ground and just cold air comes out… And sink holes. You ever hear of sink holes, old man?”

“I heard of ‘em.”

When the sun started coming up, we found a little piece of woods and took turns sleeping down by the water. The world seemed far away.

She wanted to tell me more when she woke up, but I needed to sleep by then.

We ate and gathered what we’d taken out over the course of the day to sleep and walked out again, mostly north when the sun went down.

A few hours into a second night of her telling me I was going to love it, her enthusiasm started to wear on me. It was ceaseless. I had known men whose enthusiasm had lured other men to their demise.

I'd trusted Angie not to kill me in my sleep or take my money and things and it was now, a day and a half’s walk away from home and hearth that doubt crept in, doubt based on the continued goodwill playing sweetly in my ear.

“Nothing's all that good now.” I said.

She knew me well enough to hear suspicion in my voice.

We walked about ten steps in silence.

“Did you ever go back to where you were from, Old Man?”

“No.” I said.

We walked a few more steps in silence.

“Remember coming home from vacation, when you were a kid?”

I did.

“When I first moved down to The City, I used to go home when I could. There's a feeling I get when all this flat field stuff starts to roll, when it comes up in bluffs and you can see hills on the horizon around. I feel it in my belly. It's a good feeling, like I'm coming into something right. I can't explain it. When I'm there I don't feel any different, but when I'm arriving, it's like, here we go.

”It's hopeful and easy.“

“I guess I remember. Like getting back to where you know.”

“Yeah. It just feels right.

“I miss hill country. I don't feel bad for not being in it, but I know it'll feel good to get there.”

We were walking into a village past a sign on a stone road that said Springville. I wanted to fill my water bottle at a spigot. It seemed completely dark.

Springville is about a hundred houses. A long bent row of new ones that all looked about the same, windows blown out. Further north fifty more on a couple straight streets all different- small, home made retired farmer’s homes also all abandoned. The town was run through with low slung nervous farrel cats.

When it's night you can see fire from very far away, even if it's inside a place. There just isn't any other light. There wasn't any.

The stars blanket the sky when there aren't any clouds. Most birds just sit at night and wait for the sun. Owls unselfconsciously called from the trees above the empty homes in Springville practically making words, gurgling and emoting. First far off then practically right on top of us. Probably alerting each other to the presence of cats or maybe me and Anj.

We rushed a little, to get out into the fields north of town and away. I found a spigot on the side of a sturdy home near the edge of town, by a school. The water tasted good.

Leaving Springville going north we stayed off the road in the fields but near enough to it so we could see it in the moonlight once the moon was over us.

There's a part of me that over the course of every task wonders if it's a mistake to have undertaken it. I'm a creature of my habits and ways and I tend to complete what I've started. Doubt washes in the caché of tied loose ends that is completion. Open ends close.

Sometimes I just keep on, knowing whatever end I'm in the process of coming to will cap the source of whatever doubts I carry.

Angie's enthusiasm carried me through two days' travel. Mine did and I imagine her feet hurt but we were safely on our way through the nights and in good cover to sleep in the day and warm enough.